I felt like we all needed to hit the reset button. There’s a great book (by Jim Collins) – “Good to Great.” What I was trying to do was to create an environment to where we could have a great football program. I felt like we had sort of maxed out. We had reached a certain plateau. Our conversation on that Sunday morning … I struggled more than he did.

I should tell you that I’ve heard a counter-narrative: That you didn’t actually make the decision on Richt, that it was done for you by boosters …

I can put that to bed right now. I did not have any influence from anyone. People weigh in all the time. I get calls pro and con, pro and con. But there was not one person here on our campus that directed me to do anything. That was my decision. I made the recommendation to the president. He supported that, and so we moved on.

I can’t wait to read if he says the same thing about the Smart hire.

By this way, is this the McGarity Mantra, or what?

If I had to do it over again, I probably would handle it a different way.

In any event, this is the money quote (see what I did there?):

If you’re not where you want to be as an athletic department, why not?

I would love to go season to season: Football, (then) people excited about basketball and gymnastics, then baseball. (That’s) from a revenue standpoint. We go from fall to the winter to the spring. We’re competing at a high level. That has not happened yet. I want to see that happen. Especially our revenue sports, I want to see them become successful. Because we only have a few opportunities to generate revenue. All our other sports are complimentary admission. So I want to see us maximize that opportunity, and the way you maximize it is to be successful.

Athletic success in the service of making sure the reserve fund prospers. Now there’s the Georgia Way we know and love. Screw competition for competition’s sake.

… Altogether the top 20 is something we should be proud of. Are we totally overjoyed? No, I think there’s so much room to improve. And we know if a few other teams might have advanced a little further, the top 10 could (have been) achieved this year if a few things had gone our way.

However, there is one mistake that Dooley looks back on and admits it was the biggest one he made during his tenure in Knoxville.

““There’s an old saying, ‘Don’t let the shit creep in,’” Dooley said. “Shit can start creeping in, and you’re not really paying attention to it, you wake up one day, and you’ve got a bucket full. I look back, I probably wasn’t as hard on them. I made excuses for them, because they’re young, let’s work with them and help them. Compound that with, we had injuries. All that is sort of a firestorm brewing. It only hits you when it hits you (which was against Kentucky).”

Evidently, this is supposed to mean SOD recognized that his team wasn’t mentally prepared to play a game against Kentucky that it wound up losing.

“This is, 100 percent, my worst mistake, and I was the sole reason for that loss. It only hits you when it hits you, and when I walked out there in pregame, we’d just had an emotional win over Vandy, and everybody thought we were getting back to a bowl, can win seven, the whole deal. In pregame, I knew it wasn’t right. I could feel it. It was the worst, most surreal feeling in me. I’ll never forget it.

“Watching our team, I could see it. Everything I had done since the offseason, making excuses, looking the other way, brushing aside, we need these guys, it kind of all came to a head. It was a terrible, terrible loss. … Our team wasn’t ready to play mentally and emotionally, and that was my fault.”

You just had an emotional win over Vanderbilt, for goodness sake? Dude, the shit was deeper than you comprehend.

It’s something I mentioned to my friends last night, but as the 2017 season approaches, I find myself in an unprecedented place: for the first time since I started this blog, my head is more optimistic about Georgia’s chances than is my heart.

It’s not hard to make a logical case for a great season. The schedule is favorable. The talent base is noticeably deeper than it was two seasons ago, particularly in comparison to every other team in the division. There is more experience at almost every position group, especially on defense. The quarterback has a year of the SEC wars under his belt.

Perhaps most significantly, Kirby Smart is no longer a virginal head coach. It’s reasonable to expect a year’s experience to make someone with Smart’s intelligence and work ethic better at his job.

My head looks at all that and sees ten wins, a division title and the trip to the conference championship game as an almost inevitable conclusion. So why isn’t my heart gushing with even bigger results?

Everything is in place to win the SEC East and have a puncher’s chance at the title if the offensive line can rock right away. Everything was there last year, too, but now there’s really no excuse to not take down the division. [Emphasis added.]

Ah, and therein, as we say, lies the rub. Some of you are likely to disagree, but I saw a group returning with which Mark Richt and his staff managed to grind out ten wins, facing a weak division and a soft schedule, having sufficient talent to compete and believed that nine or ten wins and a trip to Atlanta were more than reasonable expectations. Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.

As to that, we all have our reasons. Mine go back to something I fretted about when Smart was hired, namely, inexperience. No matter how much he may have learned at the feet of Nick Saban, the 2016 season was going to be on the job training for Kirby Smart, who had never been a head coach before. That showed from the beginning, as Smart allowed himself to get sidetracked with matters totally unrelated to his new gig, like staying on in Tuscaloosa through the national title game (understandable from an honor standpoint) and allowing himself to become enmeshed in Greg McGarity’s play to have the state legislature enact a law to keep athletic department information from the public (totally not understandable).

There was also a touch of arrogance on his part, carried over from all those years at Alabama and enabled by an administration and big boosters, that wasn’t justified for a rookie head coach, even if the enabling was not unexpected from a group that was both excited at the prospect of hiring a Georgia man and a little awed by Saban’s aura while not really knowing any better. However, Athens ain’t Tuscaloosa, a lesson that was taught and re-taught throughout the season.

That’s what bugs my heart. What if Kirby, out of a misguided sense of pride, isn’t willing to learn that lesson and adapt? I don’t know him well enough — hell, I don’t know him at all — to answer a question like that, but I do know that I can’t dismiss it. Nor do I consider it likely that the folks Smart answers to have any more of a clue than they did a year ago.

We can all play the “what if” game about the 2016 season. My example of that is wondering if Smart would have done better with an experienced former college head coach working as an assistant on his staff, someone he could have turned to on the sidelines and in his office with the kinds of questions he didn’t have to face working as an assistant for Saban. (No, I don’t count Foley’s Coley’s brief stint in Miami as qualifying.)

That’s water under the bridge now, except for one thing: he still doesn’t have that guy on his staff. So it’s up to Smart to grow on his own, which means for now, my heart will just have to wait.

Like nearly every defensive scheme, Georgia uses a mix of man and zone coverage. At Alabama, Smart often employed pattern-match coverages that relied on defensive players reading their opposing receivers and switching from zone or man coverage based on the route being run.

This is an advanced scheme, and the Bulldogs appeared to run more traditional coverages in 2016 but that could change this fall…

It’s easy to assume that since Pruitt and Smart are both products of the Saban coaching system, their approaches on defense are nearly identical. (Indeed, part of me wonders if subconsciously Smart and Tucker went into last season assuming there would be more of a carryover from that than there turned out to be in certain areas, like red zone defense.)

If, however, Smart’s intention is to run a more complicated coverage scheme than did Pruitt, it’s not unreasonable to expect growing pains. Will this be an area where the second-year effect has a noticeable impact?

I don’t claim to know how things will shake out at quarterback behind Jacob Eason, but there was one benefit from Brice Ramsey’s journey off and back on the roster this spring.

Since Ramsey wasn’t with the program during the spring — although he did help out as a student assistant — freshman early enrollee Jake Fromm took all of the reps with the second string.

As an early enrollee, that was really a fortunate development for both Fromm and the coaches, and it leaves the team in a better position than it might have been when August camp starts.

Ramsey and Fromm figure to compete for second-string reps in August when preseason practice begins.

That stated, Smart doesn’t think Ramsey’s return changes how the coaching staff is approaching Fromm, considering Georgia theoretically could now have the opportunity to redshirt the Houston County product.

“I don’t think so. There will be good competition,” Smart said. “The good thing about the way we practice is all of them get reps. He’ll continue to get reps and all of those guys will rotate. It was hard for us to get quarterbacks in the spring. Now we have enough quarterbacks to get reps.”

There will be good competition beccause Fromm is farther along than he would have been had he been sharing reps with Ramsey in spring practice. If he manages to avoid taking the redshirt this year, that’s likely to be the biggest reason why.

I know I’m dating myself a little with this, but for all the gnashing of teeth we do about the current occupant of the athletic director’s chair at Georgia, as well as the president who hired him, it’s worth remembering that before his tussle with Michael Adams, the latter part of Vince Dooley’s tenure as AD wasn’t exactly sitting well with the fan base. During the mid-90s, a significant chunk of the fan base was ready to run Dooley out of town due to a bad track record of hires and fires, most notably with regard to Ray Goff’s stint as head coach.

As to that, the straw the broke the camel’s back was Dooley’s decision to bring Goff back for the 1995 season with one of those this-year-or-else mandates that quickly became known publicly. It was something that didn’t sit well with Goff’s players or the fan base, and it ended with Goff’s firing before the Tech game, followed by a mad scramble to hire a replacement that ended with Jim Donnan.

Dooley said he thought McGarity found himself at odds with a faction of the fan base when he fired Mark Richt at the end of 2015 football season.

“He had to make to real tough decision in changing coaches,” Dooley said. “Mark Richt, I hired him and, well, you have this loyalty when you hire someone that you’re going to go the extra mile. If I’d have been the athletic director, I probably would have sat down with Mark and said ‘next year is very important,’ and I probably would’ve gone another year with him.”

I wonder how those two “probably”s would have stood up to boosters screaming about Kirby Smart interviewing for the South Carolina job. Probably not too well. Oh, and speaking of Smart,

That said, Dooley very much likes what happened after that. He’s a big fan of Kirby Smart and believes “he’s going to be a very successful coach.”

“He’s got a great background,” Dooley said. “He knows what it takes in this league. He’s a Georgia man. He played here but then he had his training under a guy who is a proven success in Nick Saban. He’s got a good staff and the recruiting has been great. So I really think that the future is really bright.”

I enjoy it when the guys at And The Valley Shook! roll out their preseason position rankings, and this post on the SEC’s 2017 quarterback group is no exception.

There are two obvious takeaways from their ballots: one, with a couple of exceptions, nobody really knows what to expect from the position this season, and two, say what you will about him, Dan Mullen is underrated as a developer of quarterbacks. It’ll be interesting to see how Georgia’s defense handles Nick Fitzgerald.

Quote Of The Day

“He had some good pointers,” Smart said about Saban’s advice on dealing with the quarterback battle. “But I’ll keep that between he and I. I’m always looking for good advice especially dealing with the quarterback situation.” — Dawgs247, 5/16/18